plugin

Apr

2011

Backlinks and Traffic Plugin

Update: The plugin is now available and is currently $27.00 until the plugin goes officially live.

***

On Thursday 21st April, I’ll be running a PRE-ORDER Easter Special for a new plugin called Backlinks and Traffic.

Funnily enough there are two parts to this plugin. 😉

Part One: Backlinks – is all about getting people to create links back to your site, and rewarding them for doing so.

Part Two: Traffic – is all about rewarding people for sending you traffic.

Now normally you can do this kind of thing by running an affiliate scheme, and you can still do that in parallel if you want to. But this new plugin is all about an extra, additional method of reward that will get people talking about and linking to your site. The reward can be anything you want, such as a direct cash payment in return for backlinks (yes I pay for some of my backlinks), or even an attractive product or service you can offer them.

If it’s something they want, then it will be worth their while to take a few moments out to create a few backlinks.

Here’s the thing, and one of the driving principles behind this. Many people are time rich but money poor.

They have time to go create backlinks for you, but they may not have the money to buy one of your products.

So what you can do is, you offer them your product for free in return for 10, 20 or whatever you decide, backlinks.

This is a win-win for both of you, and here’s why. They get the product for free. You get those all important backlinks to your site. And an even better idea while doing this is to tell them to join your affiliate scheme and use their affiliate link – that way it’s even more of an attractive deal to them.

They get the product for free, and also the opportunity to make some money from affiliate sales.

Just don’t make the mistake of saying to yourself “No I don’t want them to use their affiliate links.” Of course you do. Don’t actively do anything to block the flow of enthusiasm and you will reap the rewards from following that approach.

You WANT people to be excited and chat about your site on forums and blogs. Don’t you?

Every link is a potential sale and a potential new subscriber. 😉

Now looking at the second part of the plugin, you may decide you also want to give them an additional reward for sending traffic to your site. Let’s say for instance that you “know your numbers” and that for every 100 new visitors to your site, you pick up 60 new subscribers and a sale. And of those 60 new subscribers, 4 of them eventually purchase one of your other products, and that you get 6 sales of third party products you promote to them.

When you crunch all the numbers, this may mean to you that for every 100 visitors, your total earnings are $100 after affiliate payments and payment processor charges etc.

This in turn means that you could easily afford to pay 10 cents per visitor – that’s just 10% of your earnings – as an additional bonus payment of $10 per 100 visitors. If you didn’t want to pay cash, then you could even just supply another product for free.

How ATTRACTIVE do you think this would be to any potential affiliates that read about it?

Very? 😉

Part two of this plugin – the traffic bit – will count the number of clicks coming in from sources that are registered by the people promoting your site. We use a simple method of doing this, but it works a treat!

In fact the method we use allows people to link directly to your site without using an affiliate link, which means they can link to your site from forums without having their links removed by a moderator. 😉

Is that cool or what?

Like the Lightbox Popup, I’ll be releasing the Backlinks and Traffic plugin on pre-order in just over 24 hours as I write this, on Thursday 21st April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

More news tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2011

LightBox Popup Plugin

Update: The plugin is currently $27.00 until it goes officially live at $67.00.

***

Tomorrow (Tuesday 12th April) I’ll be releasing a customer requested plugin called LightBox Popup in a pre-order sale.

Now before you go “*yawn* Oh frank there’s lots of these types of plugins available”, I’d like you to stop and consider that I always go that extra little bit further when coming up with these.

And I don’t embark on a project until I’ve had a good look round to see what alternatives there out there…

The plugin has taken over a month to develop going through various prototype stages and adding in more and more features until we’re ready to release this first version, and I hope you’ll appreciate how much thought has gone into it.

The original request (from James Dunn) was for a method to create a lightbox popup that could have HTML pasted into it. It seems that it wasn’t as easy for James to find what he was after, and after having a look round myself I agree with him.

James said (shortened form):-

“I’d like a pop-up, lightbox, overlay, modal… In that box (for this specific application) I need to put some HTML for a 1SC form where the visitor can enter their name, email address, and a question/comment… I need to be able to put the HTML in for the 1SC form so it will send the input to the 1SC system.

I found tons of lightboxes that will allow me to put photos, videos, iFrames, etc, but only one or two that would allow me to put just straight HTML in the box. I found one that would allow me to put a widget in the box… but the setup menu on it doesn’t work… I think it’s just another buggy plugin).”

I decided that yes this would be quite a useful plugin to create and I’d certainly find it very handy on some of my own sites. So, putting my thinking cap on I came up with the initial spec and then started building on it.

It now does a LOT of other stuff that wasn’t in James’ request. 😉

Now you can paste your HTML in there as requested, and then there are a few “Extra Settings” that we thought would be very useful for you too.

#1 – You can enable or disable the plugin without deactivating it.

#2 – You can reset the visitor cookie if you change the nature of the lightbox and want them to see it again if using it in “Trigger” mode. The triggers are time delay from the visitor arriving, or if the visitor is about to close the page, and also optionally if the visitor clicks on an external link.

#3 – You can change the colour of the lightbox backgound using either pre-selected colours from a drop-down or use the custom colour picker. You can even set the lightbox background to transparent to make it seem like a regular DHTML popup.

#4 – The rules for displaying the popup are the same as we created for the Slide Up Ads plugin. “Normal”, “Nth View”, “Nth view with initial” and “Nth day”.

#5 – You can choose from some pre-set sizes or set it to your own custom size.

#6 – You can set the position of the popup according to the most commonly used options.

#7 – You can set a custom (HTML) “Thank You Message” which optionally replaces the contents of the lightbox if using it as a sign up box, or alternatively set a “Thank You URL” to redirect your visitor to.

***

The plugin is all done and pretty much ready to go as it is, but I’ve just asked for a couple of minor changes to be made to it, which is why this is going to be a pre-order sale.

The full plugin will be likely available by the end of the week at which time your personal download page will be updated.

Update: The plugin is currently $27.00 until it goes officially live at $67.00.

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2011

New Multiple Streams Theme – MST006

The latest in the Multiple Streams Themes is now complete, and on Thursday at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’ll be running a 50-copies-only sale at $10.00.

It comes with a nice selection of pre-designed banners including blank JPEGs and PSDs for them, plus umpteen sidebars, a selection of built in page templates, plus plugins (Ads Manager, Redirection, and bonus Squeeze Page Templates), and a set of theme options too.

The theme options allow you to turn on and off the header, top boxes and top and bottom ad areas, change footer text and add analytics code if you don’t have the Script Manager plugin.

And of course the theme supports the WP 3.x features of custom menus, custom header, and background. That last one allows you to further lighten the feel of the theme or darken it down if that’s your preference.

It’s really nice… 😉

More on this in the next 24 hours, when I’ll post a link to some videos.

You can get a sneak preview of the theme here:-

http://mst006.multiplestreamsthemes.com/

-Frank Haywood

Mar

2011

Affiliate Link Pal

Update: The sale for Affiliate Link Pal is now LIVE at $27.00.

We’ve now updated the plugin and zip, so if you go back to your personal download page you’ll find there’s a new version in there.

***

This Friday I’ll be releasing an exciting new plugin called Affiliate Link Pal.

I hope you’ll agree that there’s a little spark of genius in this one. Ahem.

If you use a third party affiliate scheme like ClickBank or Infusionsoft or e-Junkie or whatever, then the problem is they don’t let your affiliates create links that point back to YOUR site. So your affiliates are always boosting the rank of those third party sites instead of your own.

Or maybe you use a self-hosted sales centralisation script that includes an affiliate scheme.

It might work great with your main site as it gets all the backlinks from affiliates, but it’s not so good with your satellite sites as they don’t get any links at all.

And it probably even creates long and complicated “unfriendly” links too.

It’s an annoyance we’ve probably all had to live with at one point or another, and if not, then it’s just waiting to happen.

Until now.

Using Affiliate Link Pal will enable your affiliates to create a “friendly” URL that points back to your individual site regardless of the actual affiliate link. When a prospect clicks the friendly link, the plugin redirects the prospect off to the real affiliate link.

So it goes like this:-

Friendly Link >> Unfriendly Affiliate Link >> Final Landing Page

Now you might be wondering at this point why the affiliate should bother to take this extra step, and not just use the original unfriendly affiliate link instead.

There’s two good reasons.

The first is, what do you think looks better for the affiliate of these two links? (Don’t bother clicking them, they don’t go anywhere.)

http://domainA.dom/aff/hop.php?aff=fred&item=65

http://domainB.dom/secret-free-trial/

Now I *hope* you’ve said the second one, because that’s the kind of link your affiliates will be able to create. 😉

I’m sure you can see how your affiliates will be excited to be able to create interesting links with a little bit of imagination.

The second reason your affiliates will be eager to create these friendly links is sales page customisation.

We’ve included the ability for you to create customised short code tags such as their name, which then allows you to mention them in your sales copy, giving it the more personal touch.

You must have seen custom created pages that say things like “Fred Bloggs and John Smith introduce…”, well the John Smith bit could be your affiliate’s name.

So the combination of “interesting” URLs plus page customisation is a double whammy to get your affiliates to take a few moments to create an SEO friendly link for you.

Their benefit is better, more clickable links, and yours is more links pointing directly back to your individual site. It’s a win-win for both of you.

As far as I can see, this plugin will work with ANY affiliate scheme. Affiliate Link Pal is NOT an affiliate scheme plugin itself, it’s meant to complement any existing affiliate scheme you may be using.

This coming Friday (4th March) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Affiliate Link Pal plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood

Feb

2011

Delayed Widgets

Update: The sale is now LIVE and is currently $17.00.

***

This Friday I’ll be releasing a new plugin called “Delayed Widgets”.

What it does is modify ALL of your existing widgets by inserting a timer delay in seconds to the bottom of every one. When the delay is reached, the widget reveals itself by “unfolding” itself in the sidebar.

“Why?” I hear you ask…

Well, consider this.

I’ve said this before – one of the biggest problems for a marketer is getting and retaining attention from site visitors. Anything you can do without being too “in your face” (and driving them away) is going to be a benefit to you.

By careful use of widgets that remain hidden until the right moment, you can improve your chances of a subscription, or a sale, or whatever it is you want your visitors to do on that particular page.

This is because the human eye is drawn to movement.

To perfectly illustrate this, a few moments ago before I sat down to write, I was gazing out of the back of the house when a bird I hadn’t seen took off from one of the bushes.

My attention was instantly on it. It’s as if my conscious mind had no choice than to look at it.

If the bird had remained unmoving, I simply wouldn’t have noticed it.

As marketers, we can turn this peculiarity of the human eye and brain to our advantage.

For example, if you take a look at the top of this blog, you’ll see that my main subscriber sign up box (in the sidebar top right) reveals itself a few seconds after the rest of the page has been drawn.

Me doing this now makes it impossible for any visitor not to notice it. 😉

Even if they don’t act on it, they have surely seen it and it’s in their awareness as is the offer. All done without a pop-up.

Even better is that you can do this with ANY widget you want particular attention focussed on.

So say you’re running a promotion as an affiliate and you have a time sensitive ad that you want people to see more than anything. If you just run it as a “regular” ad on your blog, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, there’s a good chance it isn’t going to be noticed.

But if the visitors landing page draws itself, and then a few seconds later your ad appears in the sidebar, it WILL be seen.

This new plugin improves your chances of the stuff you WANT to be seen to actually BE seen by modifying all your existing widgets.

This coming Friday (18th Feb) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), the Delayed Widgets plugin will go on sale at a starting price of $10.00 for the first 50 sales.

-Frank Haywood